Drug Discovery - Background

Driven by an impressive progress in experimental methodologies, most drug discovery companies are confronted with the challenge to capture, process and store sheer amounts of data, generated during the different steps in their discovery processes. Well-build transactional systems to manage and support the daily discovery operations are indispensable for labarotories that are dealing with the current high througput screening demands as well as with the growing diversity in targets and assays.

The increasing demand for well managed and highly efficient IT systems is not only inspired by the internal need to manage exponentially growing amounts of data, but is also dictated by the strict regulations of authorities like the FDA, who demand complete traceability of potential drug candidates that are going into Clinical Development.

On top of that, laboratories that operate in regulatory environments, will need validation of their IT systems, to comply for example with Good Automated Laboratory Practices (GALP).
Already many Laboratory Informations Systems (LIMS) software products are avalaible on the market, however, these are not custom designed to a company's specific laboratory needs, and laboratories can end up with something that is not exactly doing what they want, resulting in still an inefficient way of dealing with their proces and data flows.